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CVE-2021-47011

Disclosure Date: February 28, 2024 •
CVE-2021-47011
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Description

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:

mm: memcontrol: slab: fix obtain a reference to a freeing memcg

Patch series “Use obj_cgroup APIs to charge kmem pages”, v5.

Since Roman’s series “The new cgroup slab memory controller” applied.
All slab objects are charged with the new APIs of obj_cgroup. The new
APIs introduce a struct obj_cgroup to charge slab objects. It prevents
long-living objects from pinning the original memory cgroup in the
memory. But there are still some corner objects (e.g. allocations
larger than order-1 page on SLUB) which are not charged with the new
APIs. Those objects (include the pages which are allocated from buddy
allocator directly) are charged as kmem pages which still hold a
reference to the memory cgroup.

E.g. We know that the kernel stack is charged as kmem pages because the
size of the kernel stack can be greater than 2 pages (e.g. 16KB on
x86_64 or arm64). If we create a thread (suppose the thread stack is
charged to memory cgroup A) and then move it from memory cgroup A to
memory cgroup B. Because the kernel stack of the thread hold a
reference to the memory cgroup A. The thread can pin the memory cgroup
A in the memory even if we remove the cgroup A. If we want to see this
scenario by using the following script. We can see that the system has
added 500 dying cgroups (This is not a real world issue, just a script
to show that the large kmallocs are charged as kmem pages which can pin
the memory cgroup in the memory).

#!/bin/bash

cat /proc/cgroups | grep memory

cd /sys/fs/cgroup/memory
echo 1 > memory.move_charge_at_immigrate

for i in range{1..500}
do
	mkdir kmem_test
	echo $$ > kmem_test/cgroup.procs
	sleep 3600 &
	echo $$ > cgroup.procs
	echo `cat kmem_test/cgroup.procs` > cgroup.procs
	rmdir kmem_test
done

cat /proc/cgroups | grep memory

This patchset aims to make those kmem pages to drop the reference to
memory cgroup by using the APIs of obj_cgroup. Finally, we can see that
the number of the dying cgroups will not increase if we run the above test
script.

This patch (of 7):

The rcu_read_lock/unlock only can guarantee that the memcg will not be
freed, but it cannot guarantee the success of css_get (which is in the
refill_stock when cached memcg changed) to memcg.

rcu_read_lock()
memcg = obj_cgroup_memcg(old)
__memcg_kmem_uncharge(memcg)

  refill_stock(memcg)
      if (stock->cached != memcg)
          // css_get can change the ref counter from 0 back to 1.
          css_get(&memcg->css)

rcu_read_unlock()

This fix is very like the commit:

eefbfa7fd678 (“mm: memcg/slab: fix use after free in obj_cgroup_charge”)

Fix this by holding a reference to the memcg which is passed to the
__memcg_kmem_uncharge() before calling __memcg_kmem_uncharge().

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General Information

Offensive Application
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OS
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Vulnerable Versions
Linux 31df8bc4d3fe
Linux 89b1ed358e01
Linux not down converted
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Vendors

  • Linux

Products

  • Linux
Technical Analysis